"diets" news and stories

You probably remember hearing about The Miracle Fruit (containing the mysterious protein miraculin) earlier this year. It makes bitter and sour taste sweet, and, by altering those two flavors, makes everything taste like something else.

Surprise surprise, they turned it into a pill!

Available from ThinkGeek, the Miracle Fruit Tablets come in dodgy-looking packets of ten and will apparently blow your mind so much, they recommend only taking half a tablet to start.

Originally documented in France in 1725, the Miracle Fruit has been experiencing a renaissance of interest since 2007. We attribute the public fascination to the hope that one day cauliflower will taste like ice cream and vinegar will taste like ranch dressing. As people continue to invent crazy diets to lose weight, everyone is on the lookout for a way to make diet food taste more like Snickers bars. We wonder what it does to cabbage soup!

For now, people are mostly using the tablets recreationally. Two pills per person makes one heck of a crazy dinner party!

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Corporations push hybrid "superfoods" - Orange juice fortified with omega 3s from sardines, fiber-filled yogurt, etc.

Trend: Dieters who stop dieting and start eating healthy food in a moderate and conscientious manner.

Sarah Palin's nomination has made moose meat a political joke. But it's tasty!

Have your eggs been optimized?

The Minimalist does Chinese chicken, with a recipe from the island of Hainan.

Mozzarella bar to open in NYC.

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In every achiever's life there comes a time to go off the life-source. Diet. Health. A simple need to just calm down for a few weeks. There are lots of good reasons for cutting out coffee, I suppose. The trouble lies more in the hows rather than the whys.

The Diet Blog shows you how. And very well, too, I might add. I might possibly even take some of these suggestions. Possibly. Maybe sometime next week. Right now I'm really busy and...can't...

Here. Drink these down:

• Substitute green tea -- its big taste and heady caffeine count can help you ween yourself off those four cups a day.

• Address the social aspect of coffee - suggests drinks you can nurse instead of coffee while chillaxing with your friends at a cafe.

• Avoid the carbs -- to prevent that mid-afternoon crash, reducing your desperate need for another cuppa joe.

All very solid suggestions, indeed. And there are others worth checking out on the site. Just be sure you're actually ready to take the plunge.

Now excuse me. It's almost time for my 3 p.m. Starbucks...

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Think you're helping your weight loss because you're saving calories with artificial sweeteners?

Put down that pink/yellow/blue packet and step away from your latte.

New research from scientists at Purdue University claim that artificial sweeteners, long thought to aid in dieting, actually makes it tougher to lose weight. Because sweet foods normally prompt the body to get ready to take in a lot of calories, the body gets confused when the taste of sweetness from an artificial sweetener is not followed by a calorie flux. You'll eventually end up eating more, or burning fewer calories.

Guess that means I'm going back to plain old sugar.

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Recently, German researchers fed lab mice separate "human" and "chimp" diets, and within just two weeks, were able to notice distinct psychological and genetic differences in the rodents.

There were three different diets: a raw food-only diet; meals from the researchers' local cafeteria; and a pure fast-food diet. The researchers found a huge difference in the livers of the mice with a chimp diet versus those with a human diet (I'm scared to hear about the difference in their hearts and arteries!) They found thousands of differences in the genes expressed in the mouse livers, which they think may be caused by our differences in diets.

...You got all that? Okay. The scientists also found that said genes seemed to evolve faster than other genes.

So, basically, our ancestors' adoption of meat and cooked foods may have shaped us into the carnivorous, brownie-eating, beer-guzzling beings we are today.

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